


Those Wordless Thoughts

by Transistance



Series: Incompatible [4]
Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: F/M, Other, Past Violence, Pigeons, Present Tense, Reflection, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 08:30:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4515003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once again William finds himself reflecting, and it begins to hurt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Wordless Thoughts

**Author's Note:**

> Cannot believe I titled the other one To Change, silly silly.  
> Present tense? Okay.

It is January now, the turn of a new year, and even though that makes it seem the appropriate time for change William still wishes that he couldn't feel himself changing.

He is not supposed to change. He is supposed to be stoic, unmovable; stone - and for the most part, he is. But she is there, often, at his side and at his desk and after hours and it has suddenly become much more difficult to force her away from him, for a reason that isn't because she has become more attached. He can feel himself changing to accommodate her, and it scares him.

The way that she perches herself on his desk when he is trying to work isn't new. The way that she leans forward and flirts and tries to press her lips to his skin isn't new. But it's the way that he reacts, the way that he puts his arms around her and draws her close and kisses her, kisses her as though he is not lying about his feelings because _god_ she is so warm, and her presence makes him unbearably happy – this is new. This is new and strange and should be off-putting but is, instead, merely comforting in a way that he hadn't been aware that anything in this world could be.

It should annoy him that she is taking time out of work hours to be with him, except that she foresaw that annoyance and he knows that she will do her papers in exchange for this. It should annoy him more, then, perhaps, that _he_ is distracted in those moments, a handful of minutes on a handful of days when he has company in an office room designed to be occupied by one. But when she is with him he knows that she is not causing trouble, and five minutes' overtime never hurt anyone, really.

It disgusts him that he enjoys each encounter with her so much.

After a while he discovers that if her lips are only on his jaw or ear or neck he can actually write whilst she is sitting on him, so he does so, much to her annoyance. She sulks and snarks about this because apparently it isn't “proper”, because it “isn't romantic, Will, _participate_ , damn you” and he shuffles her weight on his lap and ignores her and she rolls her eyes and sighs, every time. Her breath should not feel so welcome against his skin.

In the half-light of these early spring mornings he goes out before work, every day, to feed the pigeons in the park. This is a task he has undertaken ever since it was pressed upon him as a junior, in what was probably an attempt to force him to lighten up. It backfired spectacularly, because he has taken to it with the same diligence he possesses for every other task that has been piled on him over the years, and as the pigeons flock around his feet in the empty park every morning he feels a little like a ghost among the birds, what with the low mist that hangs in the mornings and deposits the untouchable dew on the grass and the almost desolate silence aside from their soft cooing and the flutters of their wings. It is as if he is seeing the world before it has been born, before the sun rises and brings with it light and life and the incomprehensible intricacies of people.

The thing about the park is that even in the blues of dawn it is still recognisable as the place where their relationship changed, again, and he catches himself reflecting on the taste of her tongue and the scent of her hair in that particular moment and he wonders at the fact that she never gave up on him as he gave up on her all the way back when they were partners of a different sense. He remembers the dead silence after they broke apart on that bench, as she thought that she had done something wrong.

He remembers how gentle her fingers have always been, touching and brushing and trailing across him and he remembers how he hit her, he hit her and hit her and hit her, again and again and again.

He remembers how her nose felt as it broke against the palm of his hand, once, and how soft her stomach was every time he drove his foot into it with the aim only to inflict punishment on her; he remembers the flashes of fearful recognition in her eyes as she would cry, “Not the face, please not the face-” which would move him to target her face specifically; he remembers he time that he miscalculated with his scythe because she moved slightly and it went several inches into her head instead of clipping at her ear and how she spent a week in medical recovery after that, getting stitches in her skull and a scar that would be hidden by her hair but never go away, and he remembers that he has never, ever been pulled up for physical abuse of power, not once, because who would stand up for the freak against her beloved arrogant monster of a superior -

He hates the fact that his mind is cleanly split between _Sutcliff deserved it_ and _Grell deserves so much better_ and he hates the guilt, the overwhelming, laughable _guilt_ that washes over him as he recognises that the only reason he views his past actions as barbaric is that he now has a vested desire to keep her from harm, allowing him to see that he was always the first to hurt her.

So he sits on the cold park bench surrounded by small grey bundles of feathery life and pretends that the fact that he has always cared for them somehow balances out the fact that he has never cared for her.

She hasn't brought it up, not yet, and he half wonders if she did not even see it as abuse at all – what with the way she seems to view a lot of things through those chartreuse eyes there is every possibility that she saw it as just another form of attention. And that makes it worse.

This is not love; of that he is almost sure. She has told him what love is, again and again over the years – declared it to him in poetry, in words, in actions. Because love is something warm, and when he is with her he feels like ice in comparison to her heat; because love is supposed to make him feel lost, and instead he is full of the dead weight of innumerable instances of guilt that are only now becoming evident in their entirety. He can see things _clearly_ now, and the regret for those actions aches more than a love-sickness ever could.

But there is a part of him that just wants to hold her – to cradle her close to himself and protect her, from himself, from herself – and that part of him thinks that yes, there is a possibility that this could be that unreachable emotion, that unique feeling that he has never had. Logically he could believe that, if he wasn't who he is; but William T Spears - cold, dead, heartless Spears - was never supposed to be able to care. Not about other people, and certainly not about Grell Sutcliff.

And yet when he lies alone in the darkness of his own home he is cold, cold, and it has nothing to do with the temperature – it is the silence. It has never bothered him before but does so now, whispering away at him as he tries to sleep, and it is at times like this that he desperately, wholly wants to believe that what he is feeling is love.

Because if it is not love, if this clawing rot that is eating away at the core of his chest is not that most revered of emotions, then it is the other one. He does not want to believe that there is any possibility of it being _that_.

He does not want to accept that what he has thought of as solitude his whole life has been loneliness all along.

 


End file.
